"Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop." - H.L. Mencken One choice Ovid had to make in Heroides 16 and 17 was ...

I, the son of Priam, send Ledaea that pure felicity which only if imparted by your giving may be mine. Hanc   tibi   Priamides   mitt...

Our next selection from Ovid's Heroides will be letter 16 - Paris to Helen . I happened across Botticelli's rendering of the Judgm...

Near the very beginning of her letter to Aeneas, Dido twice uses a familiar trope, commonly known as zeugma. She will use it more times in ...

While we've on hiatus we were fortunate to visit the National Gallery, which happened to have Titian's Danae  on loan  from Naples...

Mortal action in the ancient epic world is shrouded in murk. Even chosen sons of goddesses like Aeneas have very little notion of what they...

The previous post  offered the notion that Dido's passion for Aeneas issues in a mode of giving that is complex, implicative, and carri...

Wherever Odysseus went, the people he visited believed themselves the very center of the world. But all these lands are on the margins of h...

Motifs associated with Troy lingered in the lore of Europe well into the middle ages.  The meander above might have little to do with He...

A different account by Virgil in his Aeneid (3.163f), has Aeneas in a dream learn from his ancestral Penates that "Dardanus and Fa...

It can be illuminating to see how different Virgil's Dido is from Ovid's heroine. The Carthaginian queen's last speech in Aen...

[A few changes and additions come toward the end of this.] The last time I looked, Perseus's bi-lingual edition of the Heroides was n...